animal, cracking and splintering as her camel trod upon them. She frowned, blinking as a jawless skull turned toward her, staring with hollow eyes as it whispered.
“If you start down this road, daughter mine, you are going to die.”
Peering at the path ahead, Mia realized it was finally narrowing. Cliffs of jagged red stone rose on either side of her. Looking to the sky above, she was struck with a sense of vertigo, realizing she had no sense of how much time had passed since she entered the fissure. Her hands were shaking. Her tongue parched. Her waterskin was almost empty, though she didn’t remember drinking that much.
You are going
to die.
Ahead of her, on either side of the passage, two statues loomed. Each was carved of sandstone, humanoid in shape, details worn down by the years. The leftmost was split asunder at the waist, its ruins tumbled about its ankles. The one on the right was mostly whole—a human figure with the vaguest hint of strange writings at the base, a long headdress, the head of a cat. It reminded Mia of the lantern on Marielle’s desk. She looked to Mouser’s blacksteel sword at her waist—human figures with feline heads, male and female, naked and intertwined.
“Ashkahi,” she murmured.
Lost to time. Lost to memory. So little of them remained. A few trinkets, scraps of knowledge. And yet, once these were a people, a civilization, an empire. Destroyed utterly in a calamity born of jealousy and rage.
She turned her eyes from the statues ahead to the path beyond. Past the broken monuments, the way was narrowing, closing to a thin defile. A crack running deep in the earth, splitting into a fork farther in, stone rising high on either side. From the map on Ash’s skin, Mia knew that beyond the split in the path lay a maze of runnels and fissures, spreading across the wastelands like spiderwebs.
And beyond that …
Beyond that …
Be …
She could hear her mother singing. Ashlinn sighing her name. Smell Mercurio’s cigarillo smoke on the air. See her father’s eyes as he asked her to join him. Terror rising in her chest like a black tide, like a flood, threatening to drown her entirely.
Never flinch.
Never fear.
Her legs ached and her feet felt sore—how long had she been walking? Turns? Weeks? She couldn’t remember eating, but her belly was full. She couldn’t remember abandoning Julius, but the beast was nowhere to be seen. It was growing dark, she realized—as if the suns had finally sunk to their rest beyond the worldedge. For a moment she was struck with panic, thinking she’d been in here so long that truedark had fallen. But no, looking to the sky above her head, Mia could still see a thin strip of muddy indigo sunlight, feel the heat of Aa’s last eye in the heavens. The Dark had yet to claim dominion of the sky.
“This is all wrong,” she breathed.
She was close.
She shouldn’t be here.
She should turn back while she still could.
Walking through a labyrinth of red stone and deepening shadows. She could hear faint cries behind her, trumpets blaring, wondering what had become of the soldiers who pursued her into this forsaken place. Wondering why they ever came here.
Why she had.
Looking down, Mia saw her shadow moving like it was black flame, licking and seething over the scattered bones. Like gentle hands, tugging at her clothes, caressing her skin. She looked toward her feet and saw the sky above her. She looked up to the sky and saw nothing at all. She felt Ashlinn naked in her arms, the girl’s lips on her neck. Feeling her lover shiver as she traced the lines of her tattoo with her fingertips. The path through this place. Etched in black.
The rock around her was twisting, the shadows roiling, the light playing tricks in the nooks and crevices. It seemed as though she were surrounded by wailing faces, by grasping claws. The dark deepened, fathomless and perfect. Mia squeezed her eyes shut, realized she couldn’t feel anything anymore—not the ground under her feet or the pulse in her veins or the wind in her hair. The light of the last sun seemed dim as a distant candle, though the sky at her feet was still bright.
“You’re not my daughter.”
“You’re just her shadow.”
“The last thing you will ever be in this world, girl, is someone’s hero.”
“A girl with a story to tell.”
“All I hear, Kingmaker, are lies from the mouth of a murderer.”